too loverly to eat

A Woodland Wedding Cake

I’ve been busy making a friends wedding cake over the last few weeks, so I haven’t had much time to bake anything else, so this week I am going to tell you about the most interesting Wedding cake I have made, inspired by the oak trees surrounding the venue in Richmond Park.

My good friends Anne and Chris got married this year on a gorgeous spring day in March. Their venue was the lovely Pembroke Lodge in Richmond Park, a location that we both visit regularly for various running and cycling exploits! Anne was keen to set me a challenge and suggested a cake designed to look like stacked oak tree logs. I love trying out new things so I set about researching how to create realistic oak tree bark. I managed to find an oak bark imprint mat from America which Sarah (one of Anne’s bridesmaids) kindly ordered and bought over to the UK for me. It was exactly what I was looking for and after making some chocolate paste (milk chocolate and golden syrup) and rolling the chocolate onto the mat, it made a very realistic bark imprint.
In the weeks before the wedding I spent time making the 2 different types of yellow roses and Eucalyptus from flower sugar paste, which was dusted with grey petal dust. I made quite a few of each in varying sizes do they could be positioned in small groups on each tier.

Next I made the little otters. Anne and Chris met through our swimming club – Otters Swimming Club, so it added a lovely personal touch to the cake. I copied a picture from Pinterest and in keeping with the theme added a small yellow rose to the female otter, they looked super cute!

I made the 2 fruits cakes weeks in advance (12″ and 8″), marzipanned them and 2 days before made the 10″ red velvet cake, layered it and covered it with a thin layer of cream cheese buttercream. Then the fun began!

To give the ring effect of a sliced log I coloured lots of fondant a pale brown and rolled it out into a long oblong to about 3mm thick. I thinned down some brown food colouring so it was quite watery and then painted it onto the rolled out fondant. Next I cut 1cm strips from the fondant and starting at one end I began rolling it up into a spiral. Carefully I kept rolling and then once I got to the end of one strip I would start on the next one. I rolled until I thought it was big enough for the top of the cake. Then I placed the large spiral on a work surface lightly dusted with icing sugar and rolled it as evenly as possible till it was about 4mm thick. The top of the cake was lightly dampened with damp kitchen roll and the swirl was carefully placed on top, ensuring the middle of the spiral was in the middle of the cake. I smoothed on down the edges very slightly and the excess was cut off. This was repeated for each cake.

I then made a very large amount of chocolate modelling paste using milk chocolate and golden syrup, melted together and then left to cool until it formed a paste that was soft enough to roll, like fondant. I measured the circumference of each cake and rolled out a long oblong of chocolate paste to slightly longer than the length and much taller than the height too. Then I cut straight edges and got ready to stick it to the cake. This had to be done with melted chocolate as icing or water will not stick chocolate to marzipan. The timing was tricky and I had to work fast as the chocolate paste cools and solidifies very quickly on the cold work surface and the melted chocolate on the cake doesn’t take long to harden either. Once I had a chocolate bark in place the top was trimmed so it was level with the top of the cake and I used the bark mat to press gently on the top of the cut edge and the join to hide it as best I could. Once cooled and hardened I used a grey petal dust to add a lighter colour and highlight the bark.

By the end of the day each tier was finished and the dowling rods were added ready for it to be assembled at the venue. At the venue the next morning the cake was assembled on the wooden cake stand that I used at my wedding and the flowers, eucalyptus and otters were put in place. The cake fitted in with the theme of the wedding perfectly. Anne’s attention to detail really showed, it was a wonderful day! Thank you to Funky Photographers for the gorgeous photo at the top of the page.

One Response

[…] I shaped the cake by cutting around the top to make it a little bit narrower and then used some bits of left over sugar paste to create the shapes of the tree trunk at the bottom. For the bark and the rings of a sliced tree trunk I used the same method that I used a couple of years ago for Anne and Chris’s wedding cake, details can be found here. […]